Is a self-driving car smarter than a seven-month-old?

I hear that definition, but in terms of computer science this is not a categorical difference but one on a scale.

Clearly every tracking has to be able to re-localise among frames, otherwise it is not tracking. If you want to make a robust tracking you aim that it won't loose track even if the object is lost or obscured for a few second. These are all tuning parameters and questions of scenario. If you have a strong track of a vehicle with lots of evidence and you have strong priors about the road layout then the vehicle can disappear behind a bus for hours and you will still maintain the information that it is there. If you have a fleeting noisy observation about one pedestrian, and you don't really have a strong motion model about them (Because oh horror, pedestrians sometimes enter unmapped buildings and don't follow strict lanes!) then you might delete their track within seconds after they disappear.

So tracking creates information about objects, and how permanent they are is a tuning parameter. Some companies under some circumstances can choose to make the objects very permanent, some different companies or the same company under different circumstances can have very fleeting objects.

Given this, how much information would you need about the state of every single self driving system to write down a sentence like this confidently: "For a self-driving car, a bicycle that is momentarily hidden by a passing van is a bicycle that has ceased to exist."

I would be cautious writing such a sweeping generalisation even about bakeries and bread making, and that's a technology which has been practiced for thousands of years.

Here is what the author of the article could have done: Pick a specific failure of a specific self driving project and say "sometimes self driving cars struggle with object permanence. " It's not like you have to go far for an example. One of the root causes of the Elaine Herzberg accident was the car's inability to match her track among observations.

I honestly think they could. Less Andrew Ng, more B. F. Skinner.

Having literally just yesterday ridden in a bumper car driven by my 5 year old, I can safely say I'd rather let my Tesla drive. And I don't even have the full Self Driving beta, I just have "enhanced autopilot"

There is more to self-driving than "Object Permanence", it's a bit of a false equivalency. My 5 year old can recognize letters / ABCs better than car... still wouldn't want her to drive.

Is FSD perfect? Absolutely not. I know some people who use it don't see it this way but I see it more as augmenting my driving than replacing me. For now, at least. But a 7 month old would have a negative impact on my driving.

> Going back to self-driving, the main challenge on the roads seems to be the fact that anything or anyone can suddenly appear on the road in front of the car. It can be a drunk person, a slow animal (or a fast one), it can be a huge but empty cardboard box, or it can be a fridge in cardboard packaging left on the road for whatever stupid reason. The possibilities are almost literally infinite. A good FSD system should be able to assess, try to make a good prediction of the behavior (it's kind of OK to hit an empty box if I don't want to cause much discomfort to my passengers, but not OK to hit a fridge).

How does a human driver determine if the box they are looking at is empty or has a fridge in it? How many times has there been no way to get to your destination without ramming refrigerator boxes? How often do you even find yourself pondering whether you should ram a box?

A good FSD system need only distinguish between obstacles to the degree that it can predict if the obstacle will remove itself or if it will need to find an alternate route, with the latter being a safe default assumption. Claiming an FSD system needs to do something even a human can't do is just moving the goal posts.